| Sensitive Treatment of Two Coward One-Acters |
At Lighthouse Theatre |
| Lighthouse Theatre- Brief Encounters , Aberystwyth Arts Centre Studio , September 18, 2015 |
“Coward’s verbal dexterity and skill at construction are evident in everything he writes, but only in some of his plays and movies does his deeply felt compassion for the lower middle class, which he escaped, come to the surface.” That is Sondheim in “Finishing the Hat.” Sondheim’s is a particular critique rooted in Coward’s personal social background. The two plays, which Swansea's Lighthouse Theatre has intriguingly put together, diverge significantly both in their familiarity and in their conviction. The first, the twenty-five minute long “Mild Oats”, is a two-hander set in the London flat borrowed from the pal of soldier Hugh Lombard (Adrian Metcalfe.) Stage manager Ffion Davies has created the between-the-war milieu in great detail, from Tiffany-inspired light shade to archaic all-silver tea service. Sonia Beck is his guest, Mary Jevon, enjoying the freedom of the streets in escape from the vigilance of an aunt with whom she lives. She, in black fur coat and multi-fringed flapper dress, passes out after the mildest of whisky and sodas. Director Maxine Evans ensures an atmosphere of diffidence and unease, where the heavy-weighing carapace of social normality invites the conversation to turn to the weather. This coming-together, presented with great conviction, leads to a conclusion of some surprise. “Mild Oats” might be well a truthful account of the recharting of the relationship between the genders that followed the Great War and the first women's suffrage act. This small piece from a youthful Noel Coward might conceivably be a coded encounter akin to the Rattigan of “Separate Tables”. The serving of tea links “Mild Oats” with the later “Still Life” but otherwise it is wholly different. The language of “horrid” , “rotten” and “jolly” locates it firmly in Coward-land but it is rooted in a situation of genuine agonised drama. Where “Mild Oats” plays out within a domestic interior “Still Life” is wholly acted out in a station café where hushed voices are the first necessity for privacy. Even then a pained parting in a public place runs the risk of interruption and recognition. Here a new character in the form of Llinos Daniel's gushing Dolly Messiter is both disrupter and critical social eye. A playwright in 1936 could happily write a fifty minute play with a large cast. The first production, featuring Coward himself opposite Gertrude Lawrence's Laura, had a cast of eleven. Adrian Metcalfe in his adaptation trims out Bill, Johnnie, Mildred and Young Man. Lighthouse tours with some doubling, done with a level of adroitness and smoothness that the smallness of the company does not matter. The on-stage ensemble is completed by pianist Joshua Stokes who opens with familiar Gershwin and wisely avoids that over-emphatic Rachmaninov. Ffion Davies again provides all the detail of rock cakes and bath buns that are important to the action. The coming and going of trains of the steam era are essential. Sound design is the work of Neil Docking. The most revealing, and probably enduring, aspect is the price that the boundary-crossing of fidelity demands. There is little of the moral stoicism that Pinter put into “Betrayal” of forty years later. Laura is plunged into language of “cheap” and “furtive” and “degraded”, against which Alec's declarations of “lovely and strange and desperately difficult” are pretty hopeless. For a reviewer who has never seen much to “Private Lives” or “Hay Fever” this play has a harshness of genuine pain. It also touches on a truth, little expressed in a age of emotional lightness, that an ongoing life together may contain within itself a terrible loneliness. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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